What do I do next? I can’t decide

Sometimes I think I have too many choices.

Back in the Stone Age, when I grew up, there were three TV channels. I could watch a soap opera or a stupid game show or Superman. Well, that was easy! Superman!

For music, I would hear a song on the radio and possibly buy the record album. It cost a lot of money, so I would listen to it over and over until I was sick of it. Then I would buy another.

Books weren’t cheap either. If I didn’t find anything I liked in the library, I would buy something. “Peyton Place”. Remember that? I should feel guilty admitting that It had a few words of profanity in its hundreds of pages?  Or “Battle Cry,” another long but exciting book.

Today, I just can’t make up my mind. A tech mogul understated it when he boasted of 500 channels of TV in the future.  With streaming, cable and traditional TV, you can choose among thousands of shows. You can see high school football games in Nebraska, soccer in Spain and college gymnastics from Michigan. You can spend all day just deciding what to watch.

Now you don’t have to sit through a whole three-hour game and the commercials. You can go to YouTube and get the whole game trimmed down to two minutes. Instead of reading a book, you can download a podcast featuring an interview with the author. And you can pick out just about any song you want on YouTube, probably including a video of the performers.

So, is this any good for your brains? A new book, “The Siren’s Call” by Chris Hayes, says that we have lost the ability to focus. We are so bombarded by stimuli that we can’t turn our attention to one thing at a time.

I rarely read newspaper stories all the way through anymore, but I forced myself to read a review of the book and was given it as a gift and read it (well, listened to it on Audible.) If that is too much, you can go to ChatGPT or another AI platform and ask for a 500-word or 3,000-word summary. And without paying for it!

There are birds singing in the trees. Sorry, but I am busy scrolling through my Facebook feed. Your spouse wants your attention? After this podcast ends!

Am I going to change anything? Well, no. My wife thinks I live in “the cloud” anyway. I actually welcome all of these choices.

But please don’t ask me to spend five minutes hearing your funny story. Can you boil it down to 30 seconds so I can get back to commercial-free reruns of “Breaking Bad?”